It seems so logical. IVR and other communications technologies evolve all the time. Each new advancement offers cost savings, efficiency and/or end-user benefits that can’t be ignored. And hosted IVR providers allow businesses to take advantage of these advancements without huge upfront investments.
In today's economy, if something isn’t part of your company’s core business, it is clearly a candidate for outsourcing or hosting – IVR is no exception. With hosted IVR offerings popping up on every corner, it can be hard to justify keeping IVR functionality in-house.
So why is it so hard for some of us to make the transition? There are security concerns of course. But these concerns can be effectively overcome in a variety of ways. Based on discussions with many of our clients, the pain really seems to be letting go of the control and first-hand insight. You and your team know how critical the IVR is to your business. If it doesn’t perform, there will be consequences for both you and your customers. If you move to a hosted IVR solution, you’ll have to rely on a middleman of sorts to interpret results and keep you informed. If problems arise, you’ll have to trust someone else’s team to solve the problem with the same vigor and concern that your team would exhibit. Despite assurances and SLAs, this leap of faith can be too risky for some teams and businesses.
But of course there is a way to move to a hosted IVR solution with much less stress and worry. Outside-In Monitoring is a straight-forward, efficient way to stay on top of the performance of your IVR solutions and hosted-service providers at the same time. By monitoring the end-to-end solution with transactions that do the things real customers do, our clients know their hosted, in-house and hybrid integrated IVR solutions are working as expected and delivering the desired customer experience.
One contact recently told us they couldn’t imagine moving to a hosted IVR provider without the objective, real-time insight we can provide through Outside-In Monitoring. If you and your team are concerned about making the change or you want more insight into the performance of an existing IVR application, please give us a call. We can give you peace of mind that you’ll know exactly how your IVR is working.
Marla Geary
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
Showing posts with label Security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Security. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Starbucks and Network Security
Mike Burke likes to share the spotlight with his co-workers so Tom Ring - IQ Services' Information Security Manager - is stepping in to let you know what he is thinking about these days.
You’re in your local coffee shop, and they are nice enough to provide free WiFi for the use of their patrons. You fire up the laptop and see that there are multiple access points available there. You pick one and connect. You just connected to a poisoned hotspot being run from a parked car. You’ve got network access through their cell provider, and they are sniffing every packet. Just because an access point says it is Joe’s Coffee Shop doesn’t mean that it really is.
You’re in another coffee shop that uses authentication and encryption and you only see one access point to connect to, which you then do. Everything is just fine and you get down to work. The problem is that within just a few minutes every packet you send and receive is being logged by the guy 2 tables down. Your company email account is now wide open to him. What happened? The encryption that the shop uses is just a little out of date. In fact, current wireless encryption methods have probably all been cracked. WEP was cracked in 2005 and currently takes less than 60 seconds, WPA v1 can be broken using aircrack-ng, WPA TKIP (currently the best method commonly available) was demonstrated in November of 2008 to be crackable in as little as 12 minutes regardless of the password or key length. Current WiFi encryption is not to be trusted.
So what are you to do? There is a solution, and your IT department probably already provides it – it’s a VPN tunnel. A VPN tunnel is a virtual private network connection back to your network at work. This is an authenticated encrypted tunnel that securely transports data to and from the internal network at your office. It can be used regardless of how insecure the coffee shop is, and it has another advantage – it gives you access to all the resources that you have when in the office. Files servers, wikis, chat server, everything, assuming that no limitations have been put into place by IT for VPN users.
Please note that you still need to have your laptop protected against incoming attacks. So no open shares, have a firewall in place, no services available on any ports, etc. Again, look to your IT department for assistance in making sure that everything else, as well as your VPN, is ready for the road.
You’re in your local coffee shop, and they are nice enough to provide free WiFi for the use of their patrons. You fire up the laptop and see that there are multiple access points available there. You pick one and connect. You just connected to a poisoned hotspot being run from a parked car. You’ve got network access through their cell provider, and they are sniffing every packet. Just because an access point says it is Joe’s Coffee Shop doesn’t mean that it really is.
You’re in another coffee shop that uses authentication and encryption and you only see one access point to connect to, which you then do. Everything is just fine and you get down to work. The problem is that within just a few minutes every packet you send and receive is being logged by the guy 2 tables down. Your company email account is now wide open to him. What happened? The encryption that the shop uses is just a little out of date. In fact, current wireless encryption methods have probably all been cracked. WEP was cracked in 2005 and currently takes less than 60 seconds, WPA v1 can be broken using aircrack-ng, WPA TKIP (currently the best method commonly available) was demonstrated in November of 2008 to be crackable in as little as 12 minutes regardless of the password or key length. Current WiFi encryption is not to be trusted.
So what are you to do? There is a solution, and your IT department probably already provides it – it’s a VPN tunnel. A VPN tunnel is a virtual private network connection back to your network at work. This is an authenticated encrypted tunnel that securely transports data to and from the internal network at your office. It can be used regardless of how insecure the coffee shop is, and it has another advantage – it gives you access to all the resources that you have when in the office. Files servers, wikis, chat server, everything, assuming that no limitations have been put into place by IT for VPN users.
Please note that you still need to have your laptop protected against incoming attacks. So no open shares, have a firewall in place, no services available on any ports, etc. Again, look to your IT department for assistance in making sure that everything else, as well as your VPN, is ready for the road.
Tom Ring
IQ Services
6601 Lyndale Ave South Suite 330
Minneapolis MN 55423
612-243-5114
http://www.iq-services.com/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
